


and there's no remedy for memory

by alienswamp



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Angst, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 16:26:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072651
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienswamp/pseuds/alienswamp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>a scene of jesse reflecting in his apartment in alaska, somewhere in the future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and there's no remedy for memory

**Author's Note:**

> warnings: mentions of violence/jesse's past imprisonment by todd. and um. weed. weed alert. dorito crumbs too.

Jesse’s room is a box. He is sure that he will now never escape boxes. When he closes his eyes he’s underground again and there are handcuffs around his wrists. When he opens them he realizes how small the apartment is and feels boxed in. Even sleeping on the floor is like how it was before, but he can’t bring himself to buy a bed, financially or motivationally. 

After stocking shelves for eight hours, he collapses all the way down onto his mattress. It’s ten in the morning and the sun is only starting to come up, casting an orange glow onto the carpet, rays of the dim light illuminating the dust. The days have been getting shorter and shorter. Jesse feels the dark closing in on him. He knew it would be like this, when winter came, but every kind of darkness has been different. Nothing could have prepared him for winter in Fairbanks.

He feels the exhaustion in his core and knows that while sleep will not come easily, his body craves it with desperation. He’s tense and he packs his bowl because his fingers are shaking too much to roll a good joint. When he inhales, he holds the smoke in his lungs until he can detach himself enough from the thoughts, until he feels a little calmer. He digs his toes into the crumbs in his sheets—maybe he shouldn’t eat Doritos in bed, but he’s not going to stop, and he does everything on his mattress. 

There’s nothing worse than lying awake with nothing to do but think. Sleep doesn’t come easily anymore. As a teenager he slept whenever he was bored or lonely or whatever and it was a sweet escape. Now when he sleeps it’s no escape.

The sun will be up for five hours and Jesse will miss it. But he has to sleep now—he feels like he has been awake for days, even though he hasn’t, but his body hates working the night shift and he crashes every second he isn’t working. And he has another night shift the next night, which is actually tonight. 

Sometimes when Jesse sleeps, the four white walls of his room darken and close in on him and his body freezes and he hears Todd’s voice again. And every few nights he wraps that chain around Todd’s neck, tighter and tighter, and feels the death grow in his arms and it almost feels powerful, which is the worst part. Jesse hopes today he won’t have one of those dreams. He takes another hit. And another, and maybe he feels a little better, but his tolerance is way up. He’s lighting up almost every second he isn’t working or sleeping.

In his mind he tries to build perfect boxes. He is still building them from within his box. He closes his eyes as he exhales smoke and he can almost see himself blowing dust off newly sanded wood. He doesn’t really want to think about boxes—it brings him right back. But it’s a force of habit now. He remembers Jane telling him that sometimes you get fixated on something and you don’t know why. The door was Georgia O’Keefe’s home. He doesn’t want to think about this at all, but he is. Jane said nothing’s perfect, and now he understands.

**Author's Note:**

> soooo i confess that i was working on a longer jesse-in-alaska fic, and this was going to be a prologue of sorts. i'm probably never going to get it together and finish that, but i worked so hard writing this damn scene where nothing happens. i shouldn't have told you that. now i'm embarrassed.
> 
> title is from dark paradise by lana del rey.


End file.
